Welcome Back!

It's certainly been a while since I have posted up on here, but I'm officially back.  I've missed cooking over the past few months, my kitchen at university was so small I found it difficult to move my gigantic, clumsy limbs around the place in an orderly fashion - I'm messy enough when given a large space to work in let alone a tiny one, so I pretty much gave up on cooking anything too extravagant. However, now I have finished my degree I'm back in the comfort of my own kitchen with a lot more space and a lot more time to play with.

In other news, I applied to Masterchef a few weeks ago - I have wanted to apply for ages, but didn't ever get round to it. So another reason for coming back to my blog is that I need to teach myself to make loads of new things, just in case I get an audition!

Today I tried making my own pasta,  to make sheets so I could put together a lasagne for the family dinner. The pasta dough worked well, but I stupidly left my baby brother, Alex, in charge of making the cheese sauce for the lasagne. This resulted in a runny white liquid and a Le Cruset pan burnt to the point of no return. So we had tagliatelle and bolognaise instead...

This is how I made the pasta -it is easier than you think, especially with a pasta roller, takes ages but you can use a rolling pin.

Ingredients:
600g Pasta Flour (00')
6 eggs



This recipe makes a lot of pasta, so if you only need a bit for tortellini or anything similar you can halve the recipe. You can put all the ingredients in the food processor and mix until the egg and flour is combines, or you can do it the traditional way and make an egg-volcano and mix together by hand. Either way, you will need to knead the mixture until the dough feels smooth and not rubbery. It took me about 15 minutes and yes, my arms ache. Once you have finished kneading the dough, cling film it and leave it in the fridge for 30 minutes. I then used a pasta roller to roll out the pasta as thin as possible before cutting it into tagliatelli sized strips (about 10mm wide).

Teagan helping to make pasta

With the left over pasta dough, I made some little tortellini filled with chorizo and red pepper. To make the filling I finely chopped 50g of chorizo with a red pepper, 1 small red chilli (I'm sure you don't need to be told, but wash your hands after touching the chilli - I just learnt the hard way that chilli in the eye is not pleasant) and half a red onion and fried the mixture for 10 minutes on a low heat.
Click here for a good website which shows you how to fold the tortellini.

To cook the tortellini, I simply boiled them in salted water for 3-4 minutes. For the pasta sauce I used the same pan that I fried the chorizo in, added 2 finely chopped cloves of garlic to some olive oil and gently fried for two minutes before adding 1 carton of passata and a teaspoon of paprika. After seasoning with salt and pepper and leaving the sauce to simmer for 10 minutes, I added the cooked tortellini to cover them with the sauce before serving with a garnish of chopped basil.